


Roydon Hawke Alphabet

by moodymarshmallow



Category: Dragon Age
Genre: Alphabet Meme
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2012-11-27
Updated: 2012-11-26
Packaged: 2017-11-19 15:56:42
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,891
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/575023
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/moodymarshmallow/pseuds/moodymarshmallow
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Canonical Alphabet for Roydon Hawke, rogue, sap, and utterly unprepared for Kirkwall.</p><p><img/><br/>Roydon Hawke by<br/><a href="http://whitethornwolf.tumblr.com/">Whitethornwolf</a></p>
            </blockquote>





	Roydon Hawke Alphabet

**A is for Apples**

It was autumn, and the twins were sick. One look and their mother knew they had the kind of illness that crept up quickly, that stole color from cheeks ruddy with play to instead redden small, irritated noses. They went to bed in the evening, all smiles and exhaustion, and woke like stiff old men with sore tempers, both refusing to get out of bed when breakfast was served. Their father Malcolm, a tall man with big, deft hands, took one look at his children, and with a wisdom granted only to those men who have more than one child, immediately left for market, leaving Leandra and Roydon to care for the twins.

Roydon wanted nothing to do with two snot-nosed, whiny children. The twins were nine to Roydon’s fourteen, and by virtue of double digits he was far too grown up to care to spend time with them. That was his rationale when Leandra told him to read them a story. She did not see the sense in his argument, and pushed him into the room with the old storybook, once his, and a promise that he would be rewarded later.

The twins had been born thirty minutes apart, with Carver coming before Bethany. They were both pale, with Malcolm’s black hair, but Carver was the one who ended up with Leandra’s twilight blue eyes. They were hard to tell apart now, lying in identical beds separated only by a nightstand with a candle, both sporting necessarily short hairstyles after an epidemic of lice struck the Hawke household, and both wearing comically exaggerated masks of suffering while they snuffled through stuffed, red noses. Roydon rolled his eyes in a fit of exasperated teenage pique, noisily dragging Leandra’s old rocking chair to the end of their beds and throwing himself into it.

As he opened the book on his lap, a flood of memory struck him, and he was six again, sitting on his father’s big knee, in front of a hearth full of smoldering logs. Every time the dying fire shifted, settling the burned out logs, a patch of red appeared, like a deposit of rubies in black stone. Roydon was so transfixed that he nearly missed the best part of the story; the rescue of the princess by the poor, good-hearted stable boy. The princess, he supposed, as he paged through the old book, taking care not to rip pages already weak at the seam, must have been lovely and kind, because they always were, but he had little recollection. It was the stable boy, small and smelling of hay, with only his wits to guide him that Roydon remembered clearly. He had been trapped by a clever demon of some kind, who offered him riches in exchange for giving the demon a ride on his back. The stable boy turned it all down, because everyone knew that demons were liars, but somehow—and Roydon could never remember this part exactly—the boy tricked the demon into giving him a magical dagger. The dagger was what stuck in Roydon’s mind as he turned page after page, staring at faded illustrations. It shone like gold, and sparkled as though the hilt was adorned with diamonds, but it was strong enough to cut stone, yet fine enough to split a single hair. It was better than any sword, better than any mage’s staff, and it alone could pierce the dragon’s hide.

Roydon reached the final page without finding his story, and as the twins were starting to whine, he instead told the one of the clever black fox who could escape hounds and crows alike. This story was adequate; Bethany particularly enjoyed the descriptions of the fox as he ran through the forest, but the entire time Roydon spoke, tilting the book to show the pictures to the twins, he was puzzled by the fact that the story he remembered so well did not seem to be in the book. As he read, he realized that he couldn’t visualize anything but the dagger, which should have struck him as odd, considering the book had detailed, albeit faded illustrations. It didn’t though, because for as long as Roydon could remember he was interested in blades. Not swords, clumsy, unwieldy things that they were, but daggers, and when he and the neighborhood boys would spar with sticks, the other boys would take up great branches while he broke himself good short ones, thick and sturdy, for blocking and deft strikes. Why was it then, he wondered, that when he expressed this interest to his parents, they actively discouraged it? Carver had wooden swords, quite a few, actually, and his father had made off-hand comments about finding someone to teach him proper swordplay. Was it because swords were associated with squires, and daggers with banditry, that his interest was scoffed at while Carver’s was nurtured? That didn’t even touch on the fact that Bethany shared their father’s blessing-curse of magic, and was getting training in how to hide/use it whenever father had a spare moment.

The story was done now, and Roydon found himself feeling resentful towards his siblings. There was a wooden sword leaning against the foot of Carver’s bed, and Roydon turned from it, sneering. He took the book with him when he left, closing the door lightly only so his mother wouldn’t shout at him, his attitude forgotten when he saw that his father was home. A dead chicken now sat on the kitchen table where Leandra plucked it with care, and a rough-hewn sack full of apples sat next to her chair on the floor. Malcolm was sitting across from Leandra, his elbows propped up on the table as he spoke to her in low tones about something Roydon couldn’t understand from only half a conversation. They both turned to look as he entered the room, and when he met eyes with his father his mouth was dry.

“Do you remember the story of the stable boy and the dragon?” he asked suddenly, clutching the storybook to his chest like a shield. His voice was loud over the soft rumble of his father’s, and his mother stopped mid-pluck to look across the table at her husband, questioning him with silent eyes and a gentle quirk of her brow. Malcolm folded his arms onto the table, his soft face all smiles under the black bottlebrush beard.

“I can’t say that I do, son,” he answered with a wary eye on his wife. “There are a lot of stories in that book.”

“It’s not in the book.” Roydon hovered near the end of the dining table, dropping his gaze to watch his mother still plucking feathers from the dead chicken, something about the look on Malcolm’s kind face making him feel small and foolish. The story didn’t matter, not enough to be jealous of the twins, or to butt into his parents’ conversation, and he felt all the more like a petty little kid when his father stood and walked past the table. He heard him opening drawers, and lifted his head to watch. His father was a big man, but he was not like the other big men in Lothering. They were brutish and uncouth, like the snarled, thorny bushes that bore fruit for only a week or two during the summer, and pricked at anyone stupid enough to try and harvest it. His father was smiles and big warm hands on his shoulder, reliable as an apple tree, blooming and bearing fruit on time, without question.

Malcolm returned to the table and lifted the peck of apples off of the floor, setting it with a thud in the middle of the wooden plank. He beckoned Roydon and waited until he sat down before lifting one of the apples out of the bag and showing it to him. It was perfect; a child’s picture book representation of fruit, shiny and red as a ruby, and Roydon swore he could taste the tangy sweetness without even breaking the skin. In his other hand, Malcolm held a small paring knife, and when he slipped it under the skin of the apple, showing Roydon how to hold his thumb against the slick, rosy skin without touching it to the blade. Slowly, with deliberate care, he spun the apple around until one long, unbroken peel sat spiraled on the kitchen table like some harmless, motionless snake.

“There’s a wrong way and a right way of doing this,” Malcolm said, turning the knife around so he was holding the blade, offering the handle to his son. “You need to be careful.” As Roydon took the knife, he had a not unfamiliar feeling that his father was talking about more than just peeling an apple. He glanced at his mother, who had picked up the plucked chicken and carried it into the kitchen, where, with a much larger knife than the one now resting in Roydon’s hand, she was slicing off the bird’s reptilian feet.

Roydon reached his hand into the sack of apples, closing it around a large, firm one. This one was green, and there was a soft spot underneath his thumb. He spun it around so that spot was pressed against the middle of his palm, and placed the knife against the mottled green skin the way he had watched Malcolm do it.

“Is Mom going to make pie?” he asked, hesitating, looking up into his father’s warm eyes, less eager now that the blade was in his hand. Malcolm only smiled.

Roydon carefully sunk the knife into the apple, deeper than Malcolm had, and he frowned in frustration at how much of the white flesh he had exposed on his first cut. He had meant to only slip the knife under the skin the way his father had, and as he tilted the sharp blade in effort to do so, it slipped, and slid effortlessly into the pad of his thumb. Roydon watched, disconnected, as blood began to pour over the knife and into the apple, staining the white flesh pink and rolling down the green skin in perfect teardrops.

“I cut myself,” he said quietly, not wanting to alert his mother, but she had already turned, giving them both a look of motherly repudiation. He felt the pain now, as if it only came with the disapproval, and he clenched his jaw in unconscious imitation of his father. The juice from the apple stung, and he dropped both the knife and the fruit onto the table, alarmed at how much blood was pouring from the wound. As he started to realize the room was wobbling curiously from side to side, Malcolm put one of his big hands over Roydon’s and there was a small pulse of wispy blue light.

His father had used magic. Roydon hung his head in shame, knowing how careful he had to be, realizing too late the lesson his father had been trying to teach him. It would stick, and even later on, when his prowess for short blades and daggers was well renowned, Roydon would remember that wisp of power, the little healing light, and hearing his father’s voice as clearly as if he was the one who said it, he’d tell himself that he knew better than to play with knives.


End file.
